The Met opens reimagined Arts of Oceania galleries showcasing works from the Pacific

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: This weekend, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will be opening its galleries of the Arts of Oceania to the public for the first time since 2021. That’s after a major renovation that allowed curators to reimagine how to present art from the vast region, which includes the more than 10,000 Pacific islands in Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown got a preview of the new galleries, which feature some of the museum’s largest and most storied works, for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: This is grand, imposing.

Maia Nuku, Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: This is the Kwoma ceiling.

Jeffrey Brown: Soaring above one of the Met’s new Galleries of Oceania, one of the museum’s most iconic artworks from the Pacific. Made by artists from the Kwoma people of Northeast Papua New Guinea, the installation represents the ceiling of a men’s ceremonial house, typically the largest and most sacred building in a Kwoma village.

Each individual panel is infused with meaning, painted with symbols associated with different village clans, says curator Maia Nuku, who spoke to us even as final touches for the reopening were being completed.

Maia Nuku: You have got a fabulous set of crocodile eyes there in this gray one with the yellow eyes in pairs coming down.

Jeffrey Brown: And then you put it together and it becomes the universe.

Maia Nuku: From a Kwoma perspective. That’s right, yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Originally commissioned in the early 1970s, it’s now been rearranged according to the wishes of the descendants of the original artists to accurately reflect clan groupings.

Maia Nuku: They had a lot of input into how we reconfigured this new iteration. It’s critical for them to be able to have a say in how they’re represented.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s just one example of how the museum has rethought and recontextualized its installation of more than 600 artworks from across the Pacific.

Maia Nuku: I think go out and view it.

Jeffrey Brown: Nuku, a member of New Zealand’s native Maori community and the Met’s first indigenous curator from Oceania led the effort.

I use the word reimagining these galleries. What word do you use?

Maia Nuku: Yes, recalibrating. We are reimagining the collections for the 21st century.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s the first time the Oceania collection will have its own dedicated space, part of a broader multiyear $70 million renovation of the Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Originally, the wing, home to the museum’s collections of art from the ancient Americas, Africa, and Oceania, presented the works together under what the Met then called its department of primitive art.

Museum director Max Hollein:

Max Hollein, CEO and Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: I think that we now have reached a point where we not only have a much deeper knowledge about these works of art, but also a much deeper understanding about how to present them, how to show them to make a really truly meaningful installation.

Jeffrey Brown: The wing centers around a collection of non-Western fine art amassed by the philanthropist and statesman Nelson Rockefeller in the 1950s and ’60s.

It’s named after his son Michael, who disappeared on a collecting trip to New Guinea in 1961. His story is featured in a video in the galleries, alongside many of the works he collected, like these intricately carved bisj poles made for funeral feasts by Asmat artists in Southwest New Guinea.

Maia Nuku: He was very invested in recording the names of artists. So for this Asmat collection, we have the names of the artists, sculptures and even some of the commissioning chiefs. So really they’re not anonymous craftsmen from the past. They are master carvers, they are master weavers, and they have names and biographies and they are really revered in the culture.

Jeffrey Brown: And that’s part of the broader point being emphasized now. Much of this is 20th century modern art.

Max Hollein: I think people go sometimes through these galleries and think that these are all works from way back, as if it’s antiquity. This is the art of the last century. It has a deep impact also on other cultures and traditions. And that’s something that’s coming really to the fore here.

Jeffrey Brown: Oceanic art’s influence on and connection to Western art is emphasized now through proximity across a hallway.

A big challenge in the reimagining, the Met-specific works represent some 140 distinct cultures from a region covering almost a third of the world’s surface.

Maia Nuku: Art from Oceania is really very unfamiliar to many people. And so what I was really interested in doing with this new re-display was to have people understand the relationships, the line that’s pulling all of these cultures through over this vast kind of sphere of space and time.

Jeffrey Brown: Those relationships stretch back at least 3,500 years, when seafaring voyagers made their way from modern-day Taiwan through Southeast Asia. Then, after intermingling with indigenous peoples in New Guinea, they set out on vast journeys to settle on islands across the Pacific Ocean.

Voyaging both literal and spiritual is a key theme in the galleries, which include items like this spirit canoe used by Asmat people to commemorate the recently dead. The common ancestry of diverse island communities is highlighted through repeating forms and motifs, like the frigate bird.

Maia Nuku: The frigate bird is really a piratical bird. It’s really revered right across the Pacific. It has a huge wingspan and it can actually take food out of the mouths of other birds.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s depicted here on a pendant from the Solomon Islands and again atop a mask from the Torres Strait Islands. Another key theme, this is living contemporary art, now represented with new acquisitions like this work by Taloi Havini, who was born on the island of Bougainville.

Taloi Havini, Artist: It was quite an honor to be asked to contribute something as a contemporary artist. It sort of shows that we’re here, we’re proud, and we have artworks that deserve to be seen in the global context of art.

Jeffrey Brown: Havini’s site-specific series features designs from her tribe and comments on relationships, including those between museums and Oceania.

Taloi Havini: So, museums, although it can have a colonial past and are often criticized for holding on to these treasures, they can also be sites for reconnection.

The designs that I have integrated into the materiality of my work really speak to my ancestors’ designs about care and protection, about the things that we hold precious to us.

Jeffrey Brown: Those designs are rendered on copper, referencing the copper mine in her region that led to a civil war.

Taloi Havini: This might not look traditional because I have used the materiality that speaks very much to appropriation and extraction because I’m using copper, and yet when I show my community the work, there’s no question that it comes from and is an artwork.

Jeffrey Brown: Like Havini’s work, curator Maia Nuku hopes the new galleries reflect living traditions that can speak to all people today.

Maia Nuku: The fact that we are just one stitch in this genealogical fabric that stretches over millennia, and the planet, the land, the seas are not ours. We’re stewards of them for this generation.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.